Iceland Tomato Farm in Hveragerði | Look Inside (360 Video)

Welcome to Vettargetti, Iceland. We're going to take you on the journey of Icelandic local tomato producers. Yep, that's right. Here we produce tomatoes even with the snow and freezing temperatures. Let's discover how. And welcome to the greenhouse of the Agricultural University of Iceland, where students are trained on all the skills needed to set up the next commercial greenhouse venture. My name is Curri Helgadóttir and I'm the head of the Department of Vocational Training and Continuing Education at the Agricultural University of Iceland. Typically we would grow food crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, salad and herbs, but also cut flowers and potted plants in greenhouses in Iceland. So our biggest challenge is possibly supplying the plants with enough light for them to be able to produce. We've got plenty of cold water and it's clean. We use the same water for watering the plants as we use for drinking. We have the geothermal energy to heat up the greenhouses. The electricity is produced with green energy, either hydropower or geothermal. And we also get CO2, which is like plant food. We get that from a local source. The tomatoes that we grow in greenhouses are slightly different from the ones that grow outdoors. The ones in the greenhouses, they tend to be quite thin and tall. They can grow up to 8, maybe 10 meters during the 10 months that they live. Now you might be wondering whether the tomatoes grown in greenhouses are as nutritious as the ones grown outdoors, and it's almost no difference between them. One of the main reasons why we are able to get a high yield when we grow tomatoes in greenhouses is that we use bees for pollination. But when we're using the bees, we get something like 90-95 percent yield from plants, which is an enormous increase if you think about it from the farmer's point of view. It's also a good thing that we are not spraying with chemicals inside our greenhouse chambers, because if we spray, we kill the bees as well. So when we're using biological pest control, for example against aphids or the pests that might harm the plants, spider mites and such, if we spray, we kill all the bad bugs, but we also kill the bees. So that's one of the reasons that the farmers are not spraying in the greenhouses in Iceland. So while we are looking at more technology or technologically complicated greenhouses on the one hand, on the other hand we will have traditional farmers using organic methods of producing food. So I think this will evolve hand in hand in the future.